Why I’m advising ShareRing — A Portable Token for the Future of the Sharing Economy

While writing It’s a Shareable Life, I had an ah-ha download (a sort of future snapshot). I saw a reality where we don’t need money to exchange. We simply utilize some sort of value exchange..

As Airbnb and Uber became household names, I couldn’t help but wonder if these platforms would later be replaced by organizations willing to distribute value and ownership with providers, participants, members, users. It didn’t seem right that the valuations of companies like Airbnb and Uber were based on the value of other people’s time, resources, assets, and space.

Later I considered social networks and the value of “platforms” in the first place. For example, I often use Facebook to share my car or locate people or places to stay when I travel. A Facebook post might read, “Leaving for two weeks starting 7/1/2018, anyone have a safe place to park and want to use my car?” The backing of insurance or sense that there’s a 3rd party providing safety in the mix is definitely one reason that this type of interaction isn’t as common as it could or should be. But once strong peer-to-peer, on-demand insurance goes mainstream, this won’t be a stumbling block. My question is, why wouldn’t we put our needs out to the wider, connected net of people who are connected to the same people we are, on our social networks?

Fast forward

In the past year, I’ve got deep down the blockchain rabbit hole. Blockchain and the surrounding technologies enable a lot of what I’ve been writing and speaking about for years — value distribution, value sharing, shared ownership, and programmable money. By incentivizing positive behavior with value, unrealized value can come to the surface in all new and creative ways. All of this is open the door to generate companies that act more like communities than top-down, hierarchical organizations.

So you can imagine that when I saw ShareRing — my jaw dropped. I’d written and tweeted about this exact concept four years earlier. It’s always fun to see your premonitions come alive! ShareRing is what the sharing economy could be if we had a different system of governance and exchange. And with blockchain, this is now possible.

ShareRing offers a global way to pay across sharing economy companies, which means that you can essentially transact with value, without being forced to use what we typically know of as money (i.e. I let person A use my car, meanwhile I use the apartment of Person B in another location) and never have to pay anything! The platform also allows people to use money to share/rent if they wish, so flexibility is built in.

ShareRing also gives the sharing economy ecosystem an onramp for connection to the greater movement, regardless of the size of any given organization.

Tim Bos, the founder of ShareRing and previously the co-founder of Keaz, which has 300 car sharing locations worldwide says,

“ShareRing is an on-demand platform that centralizes the highly fragmented sharing economy by bringing together sharing services across all industries and geographies. Sharing economy users can securely access, connect, and pay for these services anywhere in the world.”

With ShareRing, there is one app where you can see everything — sort of like the Kayak of sharing economy options, where you can see all of the sharing economy services for a given location — and you can book and pay for everything in one dashboard, where your SHR token will account for the amount of value you’ve created and spent.

I’m really excited to be part of this big vision and to support ShareRing as an advisor.